This time last year. Was writing — in the same house — about Brakhage (I think). I’ve been doing this newsletter, in this form, for almost two years. At least a year and a half. It is my main outlet for writing — to think about film, aside from the podcast, both of which — together — have been a really fruitful space to gather wool about cinema — a thing which occupies, increasingly, more and more of my attention, my waking thoughts. There’s no reason to believe that will change— even if the rhythm of these pieces begins to change. Less, or more. Either way, I’d like to thank you for reading these pieces — as hazy and cobbled together as they often feel. It’s now Christmas Eve. I am about to visit a vast multiplex to watch Avatar 2: the way of water, which is neither here nor there. Look, long live the cinema. The rest is noise.
— There are corporate and national identities — the interstitial glue which draws entire flows of capital into its mouth; crunches down on them. Taipei Story might best be described by its ironies; proximities that are — really — distances. Disjunctive. There is Lung and Chin — childhood sweethearts for whom the film’s Chinese title (green plum, bamboo horse) — coined by poet Li Bai — refers to a couple whose relationship has emerged from childhood games. Their relationship is deferred, anaemic — defined more by its indifference than its passion. Rarely do they speak — Lung fixated on the scratchy, blown-out radiance of his television (mounted on the floor) on which he watches VHS replays of foreign baseball games. To think about Taipei Story is really to think about a vast metropolitan machine — the city, Taipei — which cleaves its residents apart: from each other, from their families, from their traditional values. As filmmaking, it is not corrosive — aggressive, acidic — but entropic. Slowly, toward diffusion. For Andrew Chan, it’s all a big “sarcastic fake-out”.
— Yang relies on available light, be it the smeared, flat pallor that throttles the city — making its dismal facades and office blocks rather like cliffs and mountainsides — or the dull warmth that lazily radiates from singular bulbs and lamps. Domestic space is dark, without accent or highlight. Light is not thrown so much as spread. The brightest moments come later, because the entropy is — for a moment — arrested, when Chin and her companion, drive — thrillingly, with velocity, by motorbike — to the coast, and the vast skin of the sea beyond them, and the aching pastoralism of the grass that swells at its lip. Later, there is a huge Fuji Film advert — a hoarding, of cherry red and ink black — before which Chin and her companion draw to each other's sides. There is a brighter, blinding world. It is not Taipei. The Fuji Film advert blinks. During a raucous birthday party, Chin is not with Lung. He is already elsewhere, hurtling toward death. For the first time, the flicker of smiles — and laughter. It is beautiful. When they wake, the next day, in the same room, there is litter everywhere — beer cans and splatters of cake and party streamers. The sleeping are huddled together, in the grey, blank light, the city — horrid with its ordinariness — flickering alive beneath and beyond them. Any refugia is always a refuge against something quite mechanically bleak.
— Locations are deferred, always elsewhere. Los Angeles, Tokyo. Lung has just returned from LA — to visit his successful Americanized brother (we never meet him, see him — he is forever at the end of a telephone call, a secretary’s voice — he is busy). Jameson’s Taipei — the morass of the social totality, this “obscenely moving and stirring zoological monstrosity”. For Aijaz Ahmad, this is instrumentalist, mystifying. What stirs in Yang’s Taipei? These dull bureaucratic complications — how Chin’s employer (an architectural firm, a developer — a fulcrum of their shared modernity, to be part of the machine that destroys you) is bought out by another firm (forced to close, its executives fired for a miscalculation). Greeted with indifference, this changing of the guard — the new owners (black suited, sunglasses) — the morass of corporate facelessness. Chin’s boss — Mr. Ke — seems beaten, expressionless. Repeatedly, he entreats Chin to join him for a beer. She turns him down, and down, until she doesn’t, and they eat ramen — silently — in a street-side café. If this is a liaison of the heart, then it too is already as bleak as the corporate transfer of ownership through which they are both being ground out. The urban — says Jameson — “infinitely [assembles] the empty spaces” of chance meetings, missed encounters, emotionless ironies. The modern subject has no power to cede perspective from the urban morass, the authorial coincidence machine, and is driven — instead — into a point of alienation. Returning home, late, Chin chides Lung for not enquiring as to her whereabouts. Don’t you care? When Mr. Ke returns to his wife, another bowl of noodles — the bowl he should have eaten — sits before him on a table; pale bowl, brown broth, starkly lit apartment. He looms over it, scrying the fat and oil for some exhausted signifier. It merely steams.
— There are social and emotional bonds between these figures. There are — between them — the obscuration of corporate relationships, commitments, obligations. They scatter apart from one another, are mocked (the uneaten bowl, the indifference). They remain (these people) superficially unscathed (as Catherine Liu puts it) by the tides of dispersed violence that wash around them. Disparate acts fall beneath the gaze of the lens, the arcs of Lung and Chin not at all overlapping so much as pulling away/apart from each other. For those other characters who — by blind chance, coincidence, rather than design — step into the arc of another, there is no dramatic catharsis. Chin runs into Mr. Ke, her former (male) boss [who has been trying diffidently to court her], with his wife. He doesn’t see her. She lingers in the shop a moment longer. This overlap — the Jamesian simultaneity — signals toward a narrative dead-end, not a cathartic yes, yes, yes.
— Yang keeps his camera very still. It is an emotionless blank lens, drinking in — flatly. It draws away from the figures who pace, tiny and liable to crushing, along gantries and walkways. The offices are mostly empty — a quite on the nose wink to the irrelevance of the human body to such a space. When Mrs Mei, Chin’s former boss, establishes a new corporate entity, they walk through its unfilled space — doing speculative architecture, this is where the large conference room will be, and here accounts. Chin looks from the window, into another set of windows — reflection which swallows (and distorts) the bodies of passing cars. Even machines — machines themselves — are distorted by the gravitational swallowing of finance. For Jameson, the camera’s lens is an instrument that creates moments of impossible (unspeakable) simultaneity, the authorial instrument that bears no resemblance to real life. But reflections really do bend, and twist — and distort. The viewer and the viewed are brought together (Jameson), occupying the same impossible frame. Beyond the frame exists only in potentiality, unlike the real city — which is defined precisely by the necessary accumulation of simultaneous elsewheres. Yang’s vast metropolitan core is collapsed into a sequence of impossible, inscrutable glances. What hope is there for his protagonists to reach across the divide — to see the other, to be seen. Not very much, I suspect.
— Does Yang’s Taipei come to us through its blocked perspectives? The building as a fractured space (like a shipping container), the horizon forever unglimpsed (deferred as it is by the intrusion of other structures and facades). There are vast, engulfed motorways and glances that peer down. Neon-lit cafes, a club in which the lights — screaming — fail. Lighters are used to banish the darkness. The city is shutting itself down just as it is encrusting, accumulating. When the lights come up, Chin is sobbing. Gazing from his office window, across the un-pastoral landscape of office buildings and apartment complexes, Mr. Ke remarks that he can no longer remember which he has built. It doesn’t matter. He is not author here. There is much to be said for the profile — and it really only occurs to me now, as I flick through all the images I might put in this newsletter. How often the face is shot, medium, looking to the left or right — gazing beyond, into the beyond the frame, a deferred glance; horror toward the interior. Nobody can really hold the gaze of the other. It is too much, too much.
— Chances do not become narrative fulcrums. When Chin discovers that Lung’s baseball tapes are of Japanese games, she necessarily intuits that he has visited Tokyo (the residence of a former lover) on his return from Los Angeles. No argument ensues. The drama is sublimated into yet further distance, deferral — the primary currency in which Yang here trades. Her sister, Ling, had been watching the tapes merely to fast-forward to the Japanese adverts, a language she is trying to learn (another future escapee). To where? Harajuku, she exclaims. Catherine Liu calls them — these protagonists, these women — restless and disconnected. We expect an “escapist melodrama”. Yang defers. Escape is something that happens elsewhere, to other people. The city collapses to a point. Really, an oubliette.
— Is the meadow — the wide ocean — tinged with irony? Exactly the epic cinema of mainland PRC China has its vast pastoral hinterland — its peasant republic — as its hero. Juxtaposed with the seedy necessity of the urban core. Yang gives us the hinterland, but it offers only the mildest — and most temporary — of reprieves. Our protagonists cannot live here (they exchange no words in this overdetermined Elysian field). The sea cannot give them succour. Meanwhile, Yang’s Taipei is bereft of signs and signifiers — except for the ludicrously massive Fuji Film advert, the bars are without name, the cafes, the streets, the buildings. It is everywhere and nowhere exactly. The evidence of what Jameson calls contemporary industrial production is out in force, but it is all unmoored from any specific referent. We drift about in a sea of grey, mechanical modernity. We walk away thinking only: Fuji Film. Really, Taipei Story is the perfect advert for Fuji Film. It’s all we’re allied to cart away. The de-identification is complete (thanks, Jameson), Taipei itself — as a kind of acute metropolitan reality — getting lost somehow in the shuffle. Becoming excess beyond itself — ur-city.
— Lung’s fate — a more typically melodramatic death — doesn’t escape the fixations of irony. Nothing in the preceding film signals toward this fate. Yet, he appears to drift inexorably toward it — almost as if you could describe it (archly) as fatalistic, pre-destined. The presence of such an old-timey moment of authorial ‘neatness’ in an otherwise dissolute and drifting film is the final irony, remarking on Yang’s own awareness of the artificiality and un-realness of his really real Taipei. This is not the city, he says. These are not the lives of its inhabitants. And yet. If the plot is sentimentalized, then Lung is not. The authorial cannot — finally — reach him. Disjunction. I defer again to Jameson and his reading of Terrorizers: “whose characters are all signally lacking in any of the secret merits that might encourage our complicity”. We empathise, a little. But Lung is too far gone down his road, too painfully complicity in his own destruction. Chin — what of her?
— Maimed subjects (Jameson). Maimed by what? Modernity, its obliterating organs. We’ve not even spoken of Ch’en and his wife, Yang Li-yin, whose misery is — it seems ironically — much more acute than that of Lung or Chin. Theirs is a real (square quotes) poverty, their situation abject (Yang Li-yin has a ferocious gambling addiction). Later, she kills herself. Chin’s father fumbles a business opportunity, gets snared in a precipitous maw of debt. Lung bails him out — always the helper, the saviour, in anyone’s life but his own. The money he uses to bail the father out will never be returned (really, it is his speculative nest-egg — the key to his passage out of Taipei and on, to America — a journey we know will never get underway. The “smothering”, oppressive influence of Chin’s father, which is also a great, groping source of desperation. Little of this is articulated. Lung and Chen rarely, if ever, overlap — they have few words to share. Irony — how these two figures, the principle protagonists of Yang’s film, interact — physically — with the greatest level of coincidence. The pop-out book of the narrative is inverted, a little mauled.
— It’s easy to forget that the blank space of an apartment opens the film, and the blank space of a (for now) empty office ends it — almost. Chin, to Lung: “we could put speakers here, to hold the tape deck, VCR, speakers and TV”. Lung doesn’t even respond. Their roles will be reversed later in the film, where it is Mrs Mei doing speculative architecture to Chin (we’ve discussed this already). For Nicholas Bojega, this is encroachment — of commercial values into romantic and social relations. Yet more smothering. Lung dies on a desolate bit of roadside. He laughs, or seems to — and lights a cigarette. How pointless, how inevitable — a death which only he could have really foreseen (certainly not us). It’s as if Yang reserves a final little morsel of reversed dramatic irony, disbarring us from the final interiority of Lung’s lifeworld. Yang’s camera sort of hovers behind Lung’s shoulder, his face very dark — medium shot. Lung laughs. By the time his body is carted away — daylight — Chin has no means of knowing whether or not he has died. She has already exited the film; just as he has exited the film, or disappeared into its folds. The policemen — wide shot — chat with the paramedic, who bends to light his cigarette from their flame. The city rushes forward.
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